In terms of French culture and thought, she says the biggest talent is now among women of colour: the writers Léonora Miano and Faïza Guène, the rapper Casey, the essayist Rokhaya Diallo and the documentary-maker Amandine Gay.

Reappropriating feminism

The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that […] women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labelling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization. It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation, I chose to reappropriate the term “feminism”, to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.
bell hooks - Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

If the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that feminism is a broad church that has less to do with the upkeep of your appearance, and more to do with the upkeep of your politics. Instead of asking about high heels and lipstick, the pressing questions we have always needed to ask are: Can you be a feminist and be anti-choice? Can you be a feminist and be wilfully ignorant on racism?

Feminism and whiteness

If feminism can understand the patriarchy, it’s important to question why so many feminists struggle to understand whiteness as a political structure in the very same way.

White feminism is a politics that engages itself with myths such as ‘I don’t see race’. It is a politics that insists that talking about race fuels racism - thereby denying people of colour the words to articulate our existence.

Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalised by an ideological system that has been designed for them to fail. That means disabled people, black people, trans people, women and non-binary people, LGB people and working-class people. The idea of campaigning for equality must be complicated if we are to untangle the situation we’re in. Feminism will have won when we have ended poverty. It will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default.

Feminism doesn’t work well as a polite, gender-only analysis that is neat and unchallenging enough to be accepted in corporate environments.

There is no point in keeping quiet because you want to be liked. Often, there will be no one fighting your corner but yourself. It was black feminist Audre Lorde who said: ‘your silence will not protect you.’ Who wins when we don’t speak? Not us.

There’s no justice, there’s just us

Often white people ask me, very earnestly, what I think they should to do help end racism. Anti-racist work — the logistics, the strategy, the organising — needs to be led by the people at the sharp end of injustice. But I also believe that white people who recognise racism have an incredibly important part to play. That part can’t be played while wallowing in guilt. White support looks like financial or administrative assistance to the groups doing vital work. Or intervening when you are needed in bystander situations. Support looks like white advocacy for anti-racist causes in all-white spaces. White people, you need to talk to other white people about race. […] Talk to white people in the areas of your life where you have influence.

In a world where blunt, obvious acts are just the tip of the iceberg of racism, we need to describe the invisible monolith. Now, racism can be found in the way a debate is framed. Now, racism can be found and coded in language. Attacking racist frame, form, functions and codes with no words to describe them can make you feel like you are the only one who sees the problem. We need to see racism as structural in order to see its insidiousness. We need to see how it seeps, like a noxious gas, into everything.

In 1851, Sojourner Truth delivered her now iconic speech ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Truth’s speech is one of the earliest recorded instances of intersectionality. She demanded the recognition of Black women as women and demonstrated how being positioned at the intersection of race and gender constitutes a double jeopardy which undermines Black women’s claims to justice and equality.

In 2018, Black women are still making remarkably similar claims for recognition and respect as women. In this talk, Akwugo Emejulu draws on the work of Black radical theorists such as Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten and Tina Campt to explore the impossibility of Black women’s claims to and inclusion in ‘womanhood’, and examines the implications this has for contemporary Black feminist politics. Akwugo Emejulu argues that Black feminism is fundamentally destabilised by these analyses but can be reconstructed through different ontological and affective relations of the self, which she names ‘fugitive feminism.’